Commentary
YouTube Model For TV Station Future: Podcasts, As News?
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, February 20, 2025
Is YouTube a model for where TV is going -- for younger consumers to come back to more traditional-looking video screens?
Nielsen says YouTube now has a commanding lead over all streaming platforms -- at around 11% of all TV and streaming viewing.
For the better part of the last 12 months, the big Google platform has had almost nonstop growth. According to other research, 74% of U.S. adults regularly used YouTube.
We have been told for years that local TV viewership keeps getting older and older -- at least 60-65 years of age and higher -- especially for TV stations with heavy news content.
While there is certainly a mix of users, we know YouTube can attract many more younger viewers. So... should local over-the-air TV station programmers think about YouTube more when looking to the future in trying to transform their aging platforms?
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One area to look at is podcasts. According to one piece of research, 65% of podcast listeners under the age of 30 prefer to watch their podcast as a piece of video content. For many that means the ease of YouTube.
This makes sense when looking at all the social media mobile apps with heavy video elements. Young users, of course, can get YouTube via mobile, desktop, and increasingly the big TV screen.
The hard part is finding a way to transform local TV station news content. Are video podcasts a model?
For some time, TV platforms -- nationally and locally -- have tried to transform news content to interest young viewers, with weak results. Recent efforts includes Vice Media and Cheddar News.
There are many obstacles for TV stations. First of all, this is on-demand or near on-demand world -- not a local TV station’s main thing. It is still linear TV -- though many stations do have websites, of course, where there is on-demand content.
The good news is that young people don’t necessarily mind advertising, but they want to get to the content quickly. Think TikTok, Instagram and other social media. They want to be in control to tap into stuff, consume, and then move on.
And yet there is some hope: Google executives now report YouTube is now watched on TV more than any other device. So lets make a somewhat fanciful leap:
Does all this mean that young users/viewers are coming back to TV?
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Wayne, the sad facts are that children, teens and 18-24s are --with exceptions---just not very interested in "news"---unless it's about them and their "group" ---not about Ukraine, Gaza, economics, etc. Worse, such constituencies are very light TV consumers and very hard to hold on to even if you are able to stimulate their interest with some new format or manner of presentation. Finally, very few marketers see these groupings as their primary targets.
Put that all together and it's hard to see TV news directors emulating YouTube to capture younger audiences effectively. Indeed, it can be argued that we now have too much "news" content to staisfy the core 55+ audience's needs and new approaches are needed for them. What these may be is debatable---like more even handed debates between left and right, or a greater emphasis on fact checking, or developing news based game shows and documentaries about past events, etc.